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Media Library Microproject – Update & Feedback Please!

Maarten Verbaarschot volunteered to take on a Microproject (thanks Maarten!) and for the past few weeks he has been working on interface design for a Media Library for Drupal. There is a great discussion going on in the Drupal.org issue queue that you might want to take a look at.

Maarten is currently working on the third iteration of these wireframes but he’d really love it if you can take a look and give him some feedback – anyone who has ever added an image to a web page should be able to have a say on this interface, so don’t hold back! 🙂

In particular, Maarten is looking for some user stories where users would be uploading content using this Media Library interface rather than uploading whilst in the process of creating a ‘node’ (story, article, post etc.). I know I have a couple but if you do also perhaps you can share them in the comments below or on the issue queue thread (if you’re a member of Drupal.org or would like to be!)

He is also working on an interactive prototype for this, and would love a little help from someone with good JavaScript skills so if you’re so inclined, please comment below.

Lourenzo from Chuva, Inc. has just published a dev version of Imagefield Assist. It’s loosely based on Image Assist, but it grabs images uploaded with imagefield module, instead of image module. This might be used as a basis for D7’s field-based image handling.

Jon Stacey and I highlighted Maarten’s excellent work at DrupalCamp Colorado last week! This project is also part of the Google Summer of Code, with Jon as its student, to implement this vision. Maarten worked quickly to bring the disorganized but inspired sketches and rough demos of the ongoing Media sprint!

If you want to be a part of this exciting media collaboration, join the Drupal Media group.

I appreciate having a choice that is more versatile and configurable than the WordPress CMS. I’ve used many CMS before – Vignette, Documentum WebPublisher, Site9 Editor, PageDesigner – and all have their pluses and minuses. But this user community is what makes Drupal such a great solution.

I would highly recommend looking at and emulating to a near T what Adobe has going on with Adobe.tv

This is the best video playback for UX that I have seen by far. Everything is clean, simple and most of all completely obvious…with lots of nice search and not so obvious ‘features’ that can be found but aren’t needed out of the gate!

The other major issue that confronts new users is the logical disconnect between the menu ‘path’ and the hosting servers path. I think it would be great to have a preference on the media manager that autocreates a filesystem structure that matches the menu items, with the media manager defaulting to the current folder that matches the menu of the current node being edited.

In cases where a menu item is deleted the files could be moved to a /node/nodeid/ folder to prevent document loss.